Whew. My vacation is about half-way over. I feel lucky to be able to take a larger swath of time away from The Day Jobbe, and at the same time I'm wishing for a few more days just to write and research.
An ice storm came in just before my birthday and coated most of the Willamette Valley with about a quarter inch, which made this year's celebration with friends an insurmountable challenge. I am grateful that the storm happened after the Solstice Spiral Walk, because it would have been to dangerous for folks to drive to the UU church.
I am not sure what was the most irksome: the annual necessity of having to schedule birthday events around holiday availability and weather (which is good for developing a martyr complex), sitting in an empty reserved room at a large cafe table (which is good for spreading out reference books and practicing translation of photos of Egyptian Antiquities), or having the wait staff forget that I'd already paid for the space and double-booking a drop-in group (which is good for self-righteous savoir faire). The brunch was good, and I drank a lot of tea.
Afterward, Mark and I wound up taking a slippery walk through the local Pioneer Cemetery. There's something about visiting a cemetery on or just before one's birthday that is good for perspective. We ended up at the Egyptian revival mausoleum, Hope Abbey. By this time, the air temperature had gone up enough to make ice slide off of leaves, and I was able to capture some interesting images.
The next day was in the 50's, Mark planned a yummy family lunch out at a local winery, and he made a lovely chocolate cake. His cake was much better than deconstructed chocolate thing I got at the winery (which we laughed at because it looked like an undersea tableau of a marine life-form reproductive setting), and better than the free birthday slice I got from the great bakery around the corner (which was chocolatey and serviceable).
Christmas Day we visited my Corvallis family and had a pleasant ham lunch, put together mostly by my Dad. This year there was much telling of old family stories. One thing Mark learned is that the little town that my dad puts together for the outside train is based on Colm St. Aldwyn, England, which is a kind of Burridge ancestral home. I managed to both use my camera to take some photographs of relatives and play some music on my harp—this was a win because I usually only manage to bring them to Corvallis and then not use them.
On the Second Day of Christmas, I ate some caramel pop-corn and pulled a crown off of the top of one of my lower molars. It doesn't hurt, and I managed to visit my dentist for an emergency re-glueing, but now I get to have a root canal just before New Years.
On the writing front, I'm working on a short story that has taken some unforeseen twists. I've also gone through into Scrivener and updated the formatting to "Modern Shunn Format" from "Classic Shunn Format." Probably the most difficult thing for me to get used to is using a single space after a period. And Smart Quotes.
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